Ending tenancy

[nifaitniafaire]

Hello, I have a question:

We're renting but are about to buy. We pay rent on 17th of each month and are now on a rolling month basis.

We were due to exchange on Wednesday (17th) and had planned to serve notice then. Unfortunately something went wrong with our chain and the plan is now to exchange on Monday (22nd).

I read on shelter that you should coincide serving notice with when your rent is due, so what do we do? Can we leave on 20th October (4 weeks notice) and pay him for the extra days or are we going to have to pay for the rest of the month until 17th November?

Legally he is entitled to rent up to 17th November. You could try to negotiate if for example he could relet sooner or it enabled him to do any maintenance before doing so.

how annoying - but that doesn't change the law. You have to give a month's notice ending on the day of the month the tenancy runs from.

once you have exchange, serve your notice and then talk to the landlord.

Try talking to your landlord, most will happily negotiate a few days if you give them enough notice.

Do they know you are buying and planning to move out in a couple of months? If not I would tell them now.

Bum! That's what I feared... We'll talk to the agent/solicitor and try to complete later then. Thanks!

treat yourself to an overlap - that makes life SO much easier and might well save you money because you won't have to move on a Friday.

you'll probably complete on a Friday, but if you can delay the removal it gives you a chance to check over the new place. Also you then have time to clean and checkout of the rental.

Yes - have an overlap if you can afford it. It does make life much easier. You could also sweeten the deal for your LL and offer access for any work he wants to do before letting the flat again.

Thanks, we've talked to the agent and explained that because of the chain breaking up earlier we couldn't serve notice until 17th October. I'm not sure everyone is going terribly happy about it but we were ready to go and can't afford losing 1.3k really.

Hoping to move on 10th and have some time to have the place cleaned and then check it ourselves and do bits of spot cleaning if necessary since the LL is completely OCD...

I'm not inclined to talk to the LL to try and smooth things in terms of dates, the least I see him/have to deal with him the better!

Fingers crossed that everything will go to plan, we saw the house in May for the first time!!!!

you can go when you like - but you are still legally obliged to pay rent as per the above, unless there is an agreement on both sides to release you earlier. Your contract is with the landlord, the agent is not empowered to make that change. So the landlord will need to be involved, you can do this via the agent if you don't want to talk direct.

happiness or otherwise irrelevant. Alleged OCD irrelevant. Deposit protection governs what you get back.

Talking to the agent meant: re exchanging and completing on the house we're buying, nothing to do with LL.

I get it, we have to give the LL 4 weeks notice and we have to do so before the next rent is due or we still have to pay for it, fair enough.

We're now planning to exchange and complete later do that we can serve the right notice and move before we're due to vacate the rented property so that we have enough time to clean.

ah, I see.

sounds like a plan. Good luck. Usual things about checking deposit protection status, making sure checkout happens, taking your own photos.